The present disclosure relates to systems for inferring conferee communication paradigms of conferees participating in a conference session and using the inferred paradigms to enhance a conference session in some fashion and more specifically to a system that identifies conference characteristics in a conference space and uses those conference characteristics to infer paradigms where instantaneous paradigms are used to determine how best to enhance the session.
Conference rooms or spaces and related electronic tools have evolved to facilitate information sharing among groups of people. For instance, most conference spaces include one or more conference tables and associated chairs located in a walled off space and one or more large upright surfaces for sharing information, the large surfaces typically arranged at locations for optimal viewing by persons located about the conference table(s). In many cases the large surface areas for sharing now comprise one or more large digital electronic display boards or emissive surfaces for sharing digital content (e.g. documents, application program output, videos, etc.). In many cases electronic boards are touch sensitive so that users can interact with and generate content via touch action similar to the way whiteboards and chalk boards have been used in the past.
One tool type that is almost always now present in conference spaces includes portable personal computing devices like laptops, tablet computing devices, smart phones, etc., that can be used by conferees to enhance a conference session in several different ways. First, a personal device may be used to help supplement a conferee's personal understanding of presented content. For instance, if a conferee does not know what a specific acronym used in a presentation stands for, the conferee can independently search for the acronym via the internet during a session and locate the meaning without disturbing the rest of the session conferees.
Second, a personal device may be used to obtain supplemental information about a session topic or some other related topic that may be of interest to a group of session conferees. For instance, in many cases, during a session, conferees may, based on content presented in a conference space, be reminded of additional content that may be useful or may generate new ideas about content that may be useful to a session group. In many of these cases a conferee may be inclined to search for additional relevant or at least interesting content. Once a conferee locates content that she would like to share with a group, in at least some cases the conferee may be able to replicate the content on one of the common emissive surfaces within the conference space to share that content.
Third, a personal device may enable conferees to modify the content stored as part of session content. For instance, where a session is set up for five conferees to work together to collaboratively generate session work product, personal devices may enable conferees to add or change content in a session file so that all conferees that can access the session file have access to the same versions of conference content. In some cases personal devices operate in parallel with touch sensitive common emissive surfaces for manipulating session content.
Fourth, personal devices often enable conferees to obtain content generated by the session group or shared by other conferees during a conference session to be stored in a persistent fashion for subsequent use. For instance, a conferee may be able to replicate at least a subset of conference content on the conferee's personal device for device or remote storage by the conferee for personal use.
While functions facilitated by personal devices in a conference session are often advantageous, such functionality often has shortcomings. First, conferee supplementation during a session, by its very nature, requires conferees to turn their attention away from content currently presented or discussed to some peripheral idea or concept. When one conferee is tracking down supplemental content, that conferee necessarily misses some communication that occurs. When several conferees track down supplemental content simultaneously, clear communication can be hampered appreciably.
Second, conferees that search for supplemental content do so based on their own perspective and therefore, while search results may be particularly useful to a conferee that performs a search, the results may not be useful and may in fact be confusing to other session conferees when shared. For instance, a first conferee may have a PhD in molecular biology while other conferees have no scientific background on which to draw. Here, a first conferee's search may generate content for which a detailed understanding of biology is required and which the other conferees would have difficulty understanding at best. If the first conferee shares results of the detailed search with others, the sharing action would likely have the adverse effect of confusing other conferees rather than helping in their understanding of some topic. Here, most of the conferees would require at least a second round of supplemental information to understand the supplemental information that the first conferee shares. On the other hand, if one of the other conferees performed some search for content related to biology, the results would likely be useless to the first conferee that has the PhD. The problem here is that in many cases conferees have no idea of the skill level of other conferees in a group and therefore are often unable to take skill level into account when identifying content to be shared.
Third, optimal types of content supplementation and optimal ways in which supplemental content is shared with a session group often relate to the types of communication (e.g., conferencing paradigms) that occur within a conference space. For instance, during a first session a single conferee may make a presentation during which other conferees act as an audience and during a second session a group of five conferees may collaborate to generate new content or work product. During a presentation of pre-generated content, content supplementation by other conferees would be distracting at best while such supplementation would be expected and in many cases required during collaborative content generation. Most conferees do not even understand that different conferencing paradigms exist and therefore cannot optimize supplemental content or ways to share the supplemental content.
Fourth, in many cases conferencing paradigms change during a session and therefore content supplementation and ways of sharing should likewise change to optimize effect. Here, for most conferees that do not even understand the different conferencing paradigms that occur, there is no hope of distinguishing one paradigm from another and optimizing content supplementation and ways to supplement based thereon.